As a mathematician that recently switched to almost full-time software developing, I often compare the two fields. During the last years of my mathematics career I was in the rather unique position of doing both at once – developing software of some sort and research in pure mathematics. This is due to a quite new mathematical discipline called Homotopy Type Theory, which uses a different foundation as the mathematics you might have learned at a university. While it has been a possibility for quite some time to check formalized mathematics using computers, the usual way to do this entails a crazy amount of work if you want to use it for recent mathematics. By some lucky coincidences this was different for my area of work and I was able to write down my math research notes in the functional language Agda and have them checked for correctness.
As a disclaimer, I should mention that what I mean with “math” in this post, is very far from applied mathematics and very little of the kind of math I talk about is implement in computer algebra systems. So this post is about looking at pure, abstract math, as if it were a software project. Of course, this comparison is a bit off from the start, since there is no compiler for the math written in articles, but it is a common believe, that it should always be possible to translate correct math to a common foundation like the Zermelo Fraenkel Set Theory and that’s at least something we can type check with software (e.g. isabelle).
Refactoring is not well supported in math
In mathematics, you want to refactor what you write from time to time pretty much the same way and for the same reasons as you would while developing software. The problem is, you do not have tools which tell you immediately if your change introduces bugs, like automated tests and compilers checking your types.
Most of the time, this does not cause problems, judging from my experiences with refactoring software, most of the time a refactoring breaks something detected by a test or the compiler, it is just about adjusting some details. And, in fact, I would conjecture that almost all math articles have exactly those kind of errors – which is no problem at all, since the mathematicians reading those articles can fix them or won’t even notice.
As with refactoring in software development, what does matter are the rare cases where it is crucial that some easy to overlook details need to match exactly. And this is a real issue in math – sometimes a statements gets reformulated while proving it and the changes are so subtle that you do not even realize you have to check if what you prove still matches your original problem. The lack of tools that help you to catch those bugs is something that could really help math – but it has to be formalized to have tools like that and that’s not feasible so far for most math.
Retrospectively, being able to refactor my math research was the biggest advantage of having fully formal research notes in Agda. There is no powerful IDE like they are used in mainstream software development, just a good emacs-mode. But being able to make a change and check afterwards if things still compile, was already enough to enable me to do things I would not have done in pen and paper math.
Not being able to refactor might also be the root cause of other problems in math. One wich would be really horrible for a software project, is that sometimes important articles do not contain working versions of the theorems used in some field of study and you essentially need to find some expert in the field to tell you things like that. So in software project, that would mean, you have to find someone who allegedly made the code base run some time in the past by applying lots of patches which are not in the repository and wich he hopefully is still able to find.
The point I wanted to make so far is: In some respects, this comparison looks pretty bad for math and it becomes surprising that it works in spite of these deficiencies. So the remainder of this post is about the things on the upside, that make math check out almost all the time.
Math spent person-centuries on designing its datatypes
This might be exaggerated, but it is probably not that far off. When I started studying math, one of my lecturers said “inventing good definitions is not less important as proving new results”. Today, I could not agree more, immense work went into the definitions in pure math and they allowed me to solve problems I would be too dumb to even think about otherwise. One analogue in programming is finding the ‘correct’ datatypes, which, if achieved can make your algorithms a lot easier. Another analogue is using good libraries.
Math certainly reaps a great benefit from its well-thought-through definitions, but I must also admit, that the comparison is pretty unfair, since pure mathematicians usually take the freedom to chose nice things to reason about. But this is a point to consider when analysing why math still works, even if some of its practices should doom a software project.
I chose to speak about ‘datatypes’ instead of, say ‘interfaces’, since I think that mathematics does not make that much use of polymorhpism like I learned it in school around 2000. Instead, I think, in this respect mathematical practice is more in line with a data-oriented approach (as we saw last week here on this blog), in math, if you want your X to behave like a Y, you usually give a map, that turns your X into a Y, and then you use Y.
All code is reviewed
Obviously like everywhere in science, there is a peer-review processs if you want to publish an article. But there are actually more instances of things that can be called a review of your math research. Possibly surprising to outsiders, mathematicians talk a lot about their ideas to each other and these kind of talks can be even closer to code reviews than the actual peer reviews. This might also be comparable to pair programming. Also, these review processes are used to determine success in math. Or, more to the point, your math only counts if you managed to communicate your ideas successfully and convince your audience that they work.
So having the same processes in software development would mean that you have to explain your code to your customer, which would be a software developer as yourself, and he would pay you for every convincing implementaion idea. While there is a lot of nonsense in that thought, please note that in a world like that, you cannot get payed for a working 300-line block code function that nobody understands. On the other hand, you could get payed for understanding the problem your software is supposed to solve even if your code fails to compile. And in total, the interesting things here for me is, that this shift in incentives and emphasis on practices that force you to understand your code by communicating it to others can save a very large project with some quite bad circumstances.
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